[...]
>>Which, well, that too seems to have gotten hung up at the same time
>the overview data appeared to stop being written:
>>news 19168 0.0 0.1 1480 1016 pts/2 S 18:20:11 0:00 db_archive -a
>news 19318 0.0 0.1 1480 1016 pts/2 T 21:14:27 0:00 db_archive -a
>>So I don/t think I'll be seeing any output from the db_archive
>that I started myself. Hmmm.
>
I'll bet you have a stale lock that everything is deadlocking on.
That can be caused if something that was accessing the database
crashed (or otherwise exited uncleanly) and left a lock behind.
You can clean it up with the following:
1) kill off all news processes (with kill -KILL if necessary)
2) su news -c "ovdb_recover -f"
3) su news -c rc.news
-h